Teen's Slaying Prompts Talk of ATM Duress Code

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The slaying of a 17-year-old girl after a robbery attempt has city officials discussing an ATM "PIN duress code."

Here's how it would work: an ATM user being forced to withdraw cash would be able to enter a secret code on the ATM's number pad. The code would trigger a security system and alert authorities that the person is under duress.

Lily Burk was abducted while she was running an errand for her mother at Southwestern Law School near Koreatown. Her killer slashed her throat after she made several unsuccessful attempts to withdraw cash from ATMs using her credit card, which was not set up with a PIN.

"Requiring banks to install some sort of PIN duress system would ensure that ATM users could safely and covertly alert law enforcement that they are being robbed," Smith said.

Smith said one software company already offers an application allowing ATM users to alert police of a forced cash withdrawal if they enter their PIN in reverse order. He said banks can purchase the application at a cost of $25 per ATM machine.

Some home and property alarm systems already have duress PINs where the last two digits of the reset code are switched around, triggering a silent alarm.

A 2004 Forbes article, looks at the origin of the duress security system. It was developed by Chicago inventor Joseph Zingher, who called his company Zi-Cubed.

Zingher, a former member of the U.S. Army Military Police, got the idea for SafetyPIN in 1994, when he needed cash in a bad part of town. He paid $500 to a computer science major to write the simple code that would recognize reversed, inverted or otherwise altered PIN as a distress signal, and instructed the teller machine to call the cops. He filed for a patent the same year.